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"If you (speaking of Dr. Cornel West) are not the stealth provocateur out to do the president in for money or personal animosities fueled by envy, revenge or blind ambition, then you have misread your role and tragically squandered your splendid gifts worse than anyone I can think of now or in the distant past. Ten years ago you ran around the country urging people to vote for consumer advocate and political gadfly Ralph Nader rather than Al Gore, the Democratic candidate". On Dr. King, President Obama and Political Reality: An Open Letter to Dr. Cornell West, by Playthell G. Benjamin, 9.29.2011
Dear Sister Dr. R.R.:
Thanks for sharing this open letter with me. As usual you were correct about its intensity and outright viciousness. That's a measure of how closely politics are held, especially by political activists. Also, I am getting more news that Brother West is going to jail again in New York City in opposition to NYPD actions against the black community. A few days back he was being arrested at the Supreme Court if I am not mistaken. Sounds like he is following a line of conviction that he has laid bare in many of his speeches and writings.
Brother Playthell Benjamin is a renown New York based commentator on things black and has worked for WBAI radio, written for the Village Voice and published on varied online black view sources such as the Black Agenda and Black Commentator
The following is my take on that part of Benjamin's open letter that seeks to paint West as an agent of America's plutocrats. I note now that both West and Benjamin are left to center left in their politics. As such part of their opposition to conventionality in America has to with attacking American capitalism and its corporate business captains who may be termed plutocratic rulers/plutocracy as against small "d" democrats/democracy or political decision-making supposedly determined by the duly constituted representatives of winning majorities. In America as is true globally, the ruling class corporate and financial plutocrats are nearly all with agendas that concern black folks needs as secondary at max.
Brother Cornel West's words and deeds do seem to inspire folk and make them reflect a bit more or otherwise makes folk irate and want to do damage to the brother. In this period alone he and his side-kick, the radio-tv personality, Tavis Smiley have come under some withering black left criticism for his their own left of center and unrelenting criticism of President Obama.
Brother Benjamin is among the irate and has moved to ask the question of whether West is some sort of devious duplicitous agent for the corporate plutocrats who have jammed our economy and, in doing so, caused more black pain. Benjamin could have a point, and then again he could be missing the point that both he and Cornel are opposed to big corporate capitalism yet disagree about Obama's role..
We know that on President Obama's record there is no monolithic black consensus as to his effectiveness in getting the job done for black people. There is a majority black and pragmatic opinion which suggests that he's doing okay, given the tremendous weight he has to bear including being a pioneer in this rarified atmosphere of top level political racism. The majority seem to understand that he must function in a highly charged political environment surrounded by, advised by and funded by non-black folks who have huge agendas that see black interests as secondary at best. Benjamin is of this majority black persuasion. There is also a growing minority black opinion which has rightly questioned whether, even under the pragmatic set of racially charged circumstances in which he must operate; or not Obama has done as much as he could to promote black interests, especially the concerns of the masses of black poor people and laboring classes who are now suffering triple barreled depression. Several leading members of the Congressional Black Caucus are speaking out more forcefully about what they perceive as the President's shortcomings as regards the national black agenda. West with his hyper-sensitive political philosopher's grasp of history and intellectual ideas may be among the advance guard of elite black criticism of the President.
I take my stand on the majority side and yet I would hope that the President could and most assuredly should do as much as humanly possible to meet some of the righteous demands of black minority opinion. I also think that Obama may need to become more public conscious in promoting and letting black people know how he's meeting those demands, many of which he has actually met without making nailing down in the black public's mind that, for example, health care reform is a huge victory for poor and working class black folks. How he gets his message out to black folks is essential and may take rely on much more assistance from black controlled media, churches, fraternal groups, non-profits and unions with huge black memberships.
I fear Benjamin's point in opposition to West's possible agency in acting as a representative of the white plutocrats needs a massage. Quite often in black history from the days of Frederick Douglass, Bishop Richard Allen, through Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, WEB Dubois, down to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and even Barack Obama, the claim that they were at times functioning agents for either this white dominated governmental entity or party, some white philanthropic, humanitarian or religious motivated group or that set of white business plutocrats has been made.
I think there's an element (sometimes lots of it) of truth and veracity in the historical claims of agency against many black leaders. They have not stood alone in the American system's mix; they have stood as reps of the contradictory interests that sustain their bases of power. Their bases of power are the black masses and/or professional classes, contradictorily coupled with the goodwill, agendas and funding largess of white politicians and corporate interests. How these black leaders played their contradictory roles has always been the real stuff of the argument between the black majority and minority opinion particularly on the left..
Dubois' early role at the NAACP was often castigated by nationalist oriented race men and women who felt the NAACP was a white run institution that was mainly concerned with how "progressive" white people saw the race question. Dubois himself frequently felt that he was constrained by the organization's notions of acceptable conventionality in the politics of race relations.
Marcus Garvey was attacked for meeting with and agreeing on certain points with the Ku Klux Klan. A. Philip Randolph, the old black labor boss, was criticized for not going ahead with his threatened march on Washington against Roosevelt's anti-black policies back in WWII. Dr. Maulana Karenga, the Afrocentric nationalist, founder of Kwaanza and ex-convict, was attacked by the late Dr. Huey P. Newton's Black Panther Party for being an agent of the police, FBI and white power structure back in the days of warfare between Karenga's US group and the Panthers on the West coast. On the other hand, the Panthers became the darlings of left-leaning high society and rich white folks who wrote checks, held lavish fundraisers and generally promoted a romanticized Panther mystic if not the actual Panther program. According to the late black historian, Dr. Manning Marable, Malcolm X, following a script laid down by Garvey, failed to carve out a successful southern Nation of Islam recruiting strategy because, like Garvey, he misread how best to deal with southern white folks while trying to win converts to his brand of black religious nationalism.
Much of the internal criticism of black leaders rose to the level of whether or not the black leader was a paid agent of whatever type of white entity. Yet, I say so what? Has there ever been a time in black American history when nationally placed black leaders, race men and women and spokes people were absolutely free to pursue an entirely independent black political or economic agenda? Black political and economic power operates on normally on outer the borders, and in some cases at the center, of overall white control. Even black progressive leadership types in the old Socialist Party (Omaha, Nebraska's African American Rev. George Washington Woodbey was nominated for vice president on the ticket with Eugene Debs old socialist group), the Communist Party USA, the several manifestations of Trots, the Maoists, the anarchists and other left-wing entities have functioned under the ultimate control of whites; both domestic whites and whites overseas.
Given that national black leaders normally find themselves beholding to some form of white control until the day that black independence from white sovereignty is won, whether or not the accusation of a black leader's agency is true or false becomes significant, I think, in defining the shifting borders between black majority and minority opinion on intensely hot issues of the moment. The issue of the moment is that black people are hurting more than normally because of the sorry state of the crisis of white run capitalism.
In this environment President Obama's role as the centrally perceived keeper of white Wall Street corporate plutocratic (read capitalist) interests is pitted against his other equally perceived role as the lord high advocate of black race interests which includes economic, political and culture demands for black uplift as well as autonomy from hegemonic white interests . In this drama there is room for all manner of black criticism of the powers that be. What is constructive criticism to one may be destructive to another. To play the "he's or she's a black agent" card is old news in the internal black debate. It has its usage for it puts what a particular leader is doing on blast and in the limelight. It seeks to make them accountable to what an antagonist views as the race interest. It can also be used to keep an opponent from, in turn, blasting an accuser if the accuser can get out with his or her claim of agency first, loudest and repeatedly.
West was put on blast for daring to attack the President and for running a poverty tour. Why Benjamin chose West to put on blast and not some other leader like Rev. Al Sharpton who himself is on very close terms with the White House and gets White House invites to do things that make the President and his program look good to black folks ... this is a real mystery. In the past, since the early 1980's Sharpton has often been accused of being some white someone's agent and now he could be accused of being the same for a President who himself is perceived as some white someone's agent " this time the President is also an agent of Wall Street. This is of course, true --- if the office of the presidency is considered the head of the executive committee of American capitalism whose maintenance is guaranteed by the bourgeois democratic state; the state's control of law, the armed forces of repression, the monopoly of the means of violence and social control mechanisms (according to some Marxist analyses).
There's an obvious circularity as well as an enormous amount of gamesmanship in all of this. Nailing an opponent to the agency cross is old news in black political circles. The specter of suspicion makes dealing with the so marked agent a real test of our collective resolve to overcome the legacy of plantation politics wherein the white slave masters, who were the center points of a network of communications, kept the enslaved divided against themselves with the help of reports from the field provided by dedicated black agents who sought their own advancement at the expense of others.
The attempt to put an opponents view on blast by claims of agency, even if there is an element of truth, begs the larger perennial issue for national black leadership of whatever particular political persuasion: how is it possible for black leaders to forge an independent black agenda without undo reliance on or subservience to a more powerful white agenda that mainly sees black interests as secondary at best? The truth is that black political empowerment in America, as is, is (and has been) as second fiddle to white mainstream interests. Those black political activists, among whom are many of our leading progressives like West and I assume Benjamin, want social integration, want democracy and want freedom and dignity for black people. That's all good, but they forget that freedom and dignity for black people will require fundamental reassessments of the meaning of socially integrating with a majority culture whose numerical and economic strength as far greater and thus has profoundly more weight in a majoritarian, constitutionally based democracy.
I will leave the discussion here. Hope I brought some different light on an old technique that has its pros and cons. Peace then.
